Here is a scene from a lot of church offices. The administrator sets up a new Alpha course. She adds it to the calendar. Then she adds it to the website. Then she posts it in the app. Then she emails the small group leaders. Then she sets up a booking page on a ticketing site. Five tools, five logins, one course. And when the start date moves by a week, five edits.
Nobody designs their church admin to work like this. It happens one tool at a time, each one chosen for a good reason, until the tools outnumber the people. This post is about why that costs more than it looks, and what changes when your website, app and admin run from one place. If the term is new to you, start with our plain guide to what a church management system is and does.
Time. Every event, rota, sermon and notice gets entered more than once. Individually it’s minutes. Across a year it’s days, taken from the people who usually have the least to spare.
Money. Each tool has its own subscription, and they creep. A national ministry we met at an Elim conference was paying between £300 and £400 a month across four or five separate systems. Moving everything into Hubb will save them around £300 a month, on one system built for churches.
Data. Each system holds its own copy of your people. That’s a data protection problem as much as an admin one, because your church is the data controller for every copy. When someone asks to be removed, how many places do you have to remember? When a phone number changes, which copy is right?
Handover. When the volunteer who set everything up moves on, the logins, the workarounds and the knowledge of how the tools talk to each other go too. We hear this from churches more than almost anything else.
How it looks. If your calendar or giving form comes from a separate system, it usually arrives on your website as an embedded box. Your web designer can’t style it, and a busy calendar in a box that’s too small gives you a scrollbar inside a scrollbar. That isn’t a fault with your website; it’s what happens when two systems that don’t know each other share a page.
It doesn’t mean ‘we have an API’ or ‘we can embed a widget’. It means one database.
Take a harvest supper. In Hubb you create the event once. It appears on your website calendar and in your app. The booking form is attached to it, so people book from either place. The people serving that evening are on a rota linked to the same event, and they get their reminder email automatically. On the night, the running order is in the Planner, on a tablet at the back. Afterwards, the list of who came is in the same place as the list of who gave.
Change the date, and all of it changes. Add a new member to the hospitality team, and she starts seeing that team’s events, emails and rota dates in her app without anyone doing anything else.
Communications. Because the system knows who’s in which group, you can email one team, text the whole church, or send a push notification through Broadcasts, without exporting a list. Messaging and Safe Messaging, built into the Hubb church app at no extra cost, work the same way: the groups are already there, and nobody needs to hand out a personal mobile number. Christopher Woodward at Sacred Heart Church, Wimbledon, sends the weekly newsletter to nearly 2,000 people ‘with the touch of three clicks’.
Rotas and the app. A volunteer opens the app and sees only their own serving dates, across every rota they’re on. Reminders go out without anyone remembering to send them.
Giving. A logged-in member’s giving form is pre-filled. Their Gift Aid declaration sits on their record, offline giving is recorded alongside online, and the claim goes to HMRC through Hubb’s HMRC integration as often as you like, rather than in one long annual batch. Apple Pay and Google Pay work on both website and app.
The website. Sermons, events and news appear as soon as you add them, so a visitor checking your service times on a Saturday night sees what is actually happening, not what was true in March. When Euxton Parish Church launched a roof appeal, they put the video on the website and people gave without leaving the page.
Permissions. One place to decide who can see what: the youth leader sees the youth group, the treasurer sees giving, the safeguarding lead sees what they need to, and nobody else does.
For a PCC, a deacons’ meeting or a trustee board, one system means one approval, one contract, one invoice and one number to ring when something goes wrong. That is a small thing until you have sat through the meeting where nobody is sure which supplier owns the problem. It is what we mean by ‘simple procurement’ on our Why Us page. If you need something to take to the meeting, our brochure covers the whole platform in a few pages, and our Trustee Pack answers the governance questions trustees ask: data protection, safeguarding, permissions, exit, and who you’re contracting with.
Then be careful. Changing systems is a big project, and sometimes the right answer is to stay where you are. Two questions help. How many hours a month go on entering the same thing twice? And what are you paying across all your tools together, including the website, the app, the texting and the booking site? If the answers are ‘not many’ and ‘not much’, you’re probably fine. If they surprise you, it’s worth a conversation.
You also don’t have to move everything at once. Plenty of churches start with the Hubb website, add the app, and bring the database across when they’re ready. Hebron Evangelical Church in Aberdeen used the website-only plan for years, then switched on the admin side, and says it changed how they manage the church, particularly after GDPR came in. Our how it works page walks through each step, and our 2024 post on getting organised and staying organised has more on how churches have done it.
Hubb always includes the website, because that’s where most of the benefit of one system shows up. If your website is the part you’re happy with, start with the website-only plan and let the rest follow when you’re ready.
Yes. People data can be imported from spreadsheets, and our support team will help you get set up at no extra cost. If you’d rather we did the loading for you, from your existing spreadsheets, Word documents and images, we quote for that separately based on the time it takes.
No. Most churches go live with the website first, then switch on the app, rotas, giving and the rest one at a time as the team gets comfortable.
Adam Johannes CEO, Hubb, and more than 20 years in church software. Church member, children’s ministry volunteer, and Chair of Trustees of a Christian charity.